Make a Hologram Projector for your Phone at the TEC Lab!

Join us on Wednesday, December 7 from 11:00am-1:00pm or 6:00-8:00pm to make a hologram projector for your phone or tablet!  

You use your phone for a lot of things, but did you know it can project holograms?   These 3D images can jump out of your phone with the creation of a hologram projector.  We'll give you the plans and materials to create your own, and guide you on where you can find holograms to display and amaze your friends and yourself!

All are welcome to attend.  Come to the TEC Lab in Room 125 in the Gardner-Harvey Library.

Remember,  if you attend two or more of our TEC Lab workshops and speaker events in Fall 2016, you will be entered in a drawing for a Kindle Fire tablet.

Middletown Book Discussion Title for November (again)

The MUM Book Discussion group will next meet on Tuesday, November 29 to discuss Katarina Bivald's book The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend.  We will meet at 12 pm in Room 124 in the Gardner-Harvey Library. Yes, we did already meet in November, but we skipped October; so, it all basically works out.

Here is a brief summary of the title, along with links to request the book from  OhioLINK, and SearchOhio libraries (Just click "Request" and choose "Miami University" from the dropdown list.  Then enter your UniqueID and password, and the library from which you would like to retrieve the item):  

"Broken Wheel, Iowa, has never seen anyone like Sara, who traveled all the way from Sweden just to meet her pen pal, Amy. When she arrives, however, she finds that Amy's funeral has just ended. Luckily, the townspeople are happy to look after their bewildered tourist--even if they don't understand her peculiar need for books."

OhioLINK and  SearchOhio 

Give it a read, or read something else interesting and come along to our discussion.  Share what else you've been reading/watching/listening to/experiencing, and help us plan our future readings.

Have an idea for a book to discuss?  Let us know and check out our page of past and future reads at http://www.mid.muohio.edu/library/bookdiscussion.htm

Learn to create a 3D object in 30 minutes at the TEC Lab!

Join us on Tuesday, November 15 OR Wednesday, November 16 and learn to create a 3D object with Tinkercad!  

From 3:00-4:00 on Tuesday or 12:00-1:00 on Wednesday, you'll have the chance to learn how to use a free, web-based tool to create anything you can imagine as a 3D object.  That object can then be printed or used in other software applications.

We'll spend 30 minutes getting you up and running in Tinkercad, and then you can stay for the remainder of the hour to work on your object.  You can even decide to have us print a copy in the color of your choice.  Make the investment of a little time to learn a skill you can use to create objects and content for modeling, prototyping, and just plain fun.

All are welcome to attend.  Please RSVP to burkejj@miamioh.edu with the day you plan to attend to reserve your spot (walk-ins are welcome if seats remain).  Come to Room 111 in the Gardner-Harvey Library for your opportunity to create a 3D object.

Remember,  if you attend two or more of our TEC Lab workshops and speaker events in Fall 2016, you will be entered in a drawing for a Kindle Fire tablet.

Who won a Colin at the Library in 2015/2016?

Yes, we're here on the red carpet at the Gardner-Harvey Library once again to award this year's Colins, the award given to the items most checked out from the library during the previous academic year.  The award is named after Colin Gardner, one of the two namesakes of the library (George Harvey is the other, but really, the Georges? That wouldn't work).

We added 1194 items to our collection last year, plus some reserve items that just circulate briefly.  Which of them were used the most?

Entrants in the awards had to be added to the collection from July 1, 2015 through June 30, 2016.  Here are some top ten lists in the following categories, along with the number of circulations per item:

Top ten textbooks

1. Leadership (BTE 401) - 42 (and the winner of the Colin!)
2. Public Speaking: An Audience-Centered Approach - 26
3. Theatre: the Lively Art (THE 191) - 24
4. Human Biology (BIO 161) - 23 (so close!)
5. A Different Mirror: a History of Multicultural America (IDS 159) - 21
6. Personal Finance (BTE 117) - 18
7. Applied Fluid Mechanics (ENT 310) - 15
8. Marketing: the Core (BTE 105) - 15
9. What is Your Race?: The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans (IDS 159) - 12
10. Ethics in a Computing Culture (CIT/CSE 262) - 12

Top ten fiction titles

1. Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee - 6  (and the winner of the Colin!)
2. Uprooted, Naomi Novik - 5
3. Seveneves, Neal Stephenson - 5
4. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho - 5
5. Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee (copy 2) - 4
6. Winter, Marissa Meyer - 4
7. Career of Evil, Robert Galbraith - 4
8. The Nest, Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney - 4
9. Before the Fall, Noah Hawley - 4
10. Circling the Sun, Paula McLain - 3

Top ten non-fiction titles

1. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Marie Kondo - 8  (and the winner of the Colin!)
2. The Official Guide for GMAT Review 2016 - 8
3. The Official Guide for GMAT Quantitative Review, 2016 - 7
4. CPT 2016 Professional Edition - 6
5. Modern Romance, Aziz Ansari - 5
6. Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates - 5
7. Rising Strong, Brenae Brown  - 5
8. Furiously Happy, Jenny Lawson - 5
9. Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, Ashlee Vance - 4
10. Arms and the Dudes: How Three Stoners from Miami Beach Became the Most Unlikely Gunrunners in History, Guy Lawson - 4

Top five juvenile books (many tied with one check out)

1. What Pet Should I Get?, Dr. Seuss - 4  (and the winner of the Colin!)
2. Your Voice Is All I Hear, Leah Scheier - 2
3. The Story of Diva and Flea, Mo Willems - 2
4. Be a Friend, Salina Yoon
5. Freedom in Congo Square, Carole Boston Weatherford

Top ten DVDs

1. Game of Thrones, Season 1 - 5  (and the winner of the Colin!)
2. Penny Dreadful, Season 1 - 4
3. Salam Neighbor - 3
4. Citizen USA - 2
5. 300 - 2
6. Spider-Man (Tobey Macguire/Kristen Dunst) - 2
7. The Room (Tommy Wiseau) - 2
8. Do the Right Thing - 2
9. School Daze - 2
10. It Follows - 2

Top five pieces of equipment

1. A close match among five iPad charging blocks and cables (26 checkouts was the highest)

And that ends the Colin Awards for 2016!  A big congratulations to our winners and to all the nominees!

How was the library used in 2015/16?

Here are the full annual stats from fiscal year 2016 (the 2015-16 academic year) for several of the Gardner-Harvey Library's (GHL) services. I hope you will find them useful to see how people use the library. 

These statistics reflect what happened between July 1, 2015 to June 30, 2016. Some stats we keep locally, others we pull from university-wide or OhioLINK-wide systems, and some are provided by database vendors.

On Average
Taking the statistics below and guesstimating a total Middletown community of 2000 students, faculty and staff members (and including community patrons), here's what can be said about the average person on campus. She:

- checks two items out from the library in a year (reserves and local/MU/OhioLINK collection items)
- visits the library 26 times per year
- downloads five full-text articles each year.
- accesses the library web site nine times per year.

- participates in a library instruction session or an embedded librarian course once per year (if she is a student).

Now on to the detailed analysis!

Both a Borrower and a Lender Be
- GHL patrons checked out 2,537 books and DVDs from us (1,089 from our local collection, 862 ordered from other MU libraries, and 586 items ordered from OhioLINK - that means that more than 55% of the items used by campus patrons came from libraries beyond GHL). That is a 14% decrease in borrowing from 2014-2015.  

- The GHL collection registered 3,115 checkouts (that's the 1,089 items checked out by Middletown patrons above, plus 1206 items sent to OhioLINK users, and 820 sent to other MU libraries - that means that 65% of the uses of our materials came from libraries beyond GHL). That is a 14% decrease in checkouts from 2014-2015. 

- GHL patrons checked out 2,324 reserve items from us (this includes faculty-placed course reserves, textbooks on reserve, study rooms, laptops, iPads, and other equipment). That is a 2% decrease from 2014-2015. Textbooks on reserve checkouts more than doubled in 2015-16, with 685 checkouts vs. 325 in 2014-15.

- In terms of building up our collection, Middletown faculty, staff, and students ordered 1194 items to add to our collection this year. That is a 20% increase from 2014-2015.  

- We registered a total of 5,439 checkouts of items in our collection (reserves and circulating materials). The circulating items at GHL number 30,529, so each item in the collection circulated 0.18 times this year (all items in our library circulate). 

The Quest for Information
- Middletown patrons spent 14,371 search sessions downloading 11,228  full-text articles from Ebsco databases provided to us through Miami University and OhioLINK.  This only represents use of the databases on campus.  Those numbers reflect a 46% increase in search sessions and a 10% decrease in downloads from 2014-2015).

- On their way to these databases, 51 people visit our web site every day. That's a total of 18,772 visits for the year, by 8,352 unique individuals. That's a 19% increase in visits and a 24% increase in unique visitors from 2014-2015.

A Place for Work, Study, and Remove from the World
- GHL is open 57 hours per week.

- We averaged 225 visitors per day, for a total of 52,631 visits this year.  This reflects a 14% decrease from 2014-2015.  This may be due in part to our renovation, which closed off much of the library following finals week in May 2016, and moving around our seating areas as we cleared out the book stacks area ahead of the renovation in Winter Term 2016.

- We regularly schedule the library learning lab (GRD 111) for single class sessions. We also had 3 classes meet there weekly during fall semester and 3 met there during the spring.  We also made use of our study rooms with 5 classes meeting weekly during the fall in STAR Lounge 2.

- Our two STAR Lounges have been checked out 113 times this year by students.  That represents an 18% decrease from 2014-15.  They were also used weekly by librarians and other faculty and staff members for meetings. 

Helping You Find What You Need
- Inside and outside of the library, we gave library instruction presentations in 45 classes this year, reaching 773 students (a decrease of 28% from 2014-2015). The courses represented were from 14 different departments.

- Our Embedded Librarian program reached students from 72 course sections in their Canvas course sites during the academic year (that is a 10% decrease from 2014-2015). We helped over 1,503 students with their information needs through the program.

What don't we know about how the library is used?
- One key part missing from these figures is off-campus use of library resources: all off-campus use is tallied as MU-wide use, so we do not know how many Middletown patrons are using databases from home.  We have also lost meaningful data for on-campus use from some of our OhioLINK full-text resources.

- We don't have campus-specific stats for all database searches - we're missing uses of Lexis-Nexis and other databases.

- We hope you'll continue to let us know what you think about the library, what you need from us, and what materials we should order for the collection.

Thanks to everyone for making the library and its resources a vital part of your academic lives!

New books and DVDs added to the Gardner-Harvey Library in October!

See our new materials list of items we added to the collection in October! We added 183 books, e-books, DVDs, and other items during that time, thanks to your selections and suggestions. The list is sorted by call number, with items grouped roughly by subject area.

Here are seven titles from the list, to give you an idea of what we've been buying:

• Our black sons matter : mothers talk about fears, sorrows, and hopes
• Uprooting sexual violence in higher education : a guide for practitioners and faculty
• Winter's bone (Motion picture)
• The trespasser / Tana French
• Time travel : a history / James Gleick
• The big book of makerspace projects : inspiring makers to experiment, create, and learn
• Do not say we have nothing : a novel / Madeleine Thien

This tag will show you all of the prior lists of new materials, in reverse chronological order. We are eager to hear from you about individual items you would like us to buy, or types of items we should be on the lookout for, or general subject areas we should build up in the collection. Your input will help us keep the collection working well as add items in 2016/17!  We're looking forward to what you'll recommend next.

If you have a suggestion of something to order, please use our "Tell GHL to Buy It" form, email Amy Carmichael (carmicae@miamioh.edu), or drop by the library with your request. And pass your general suggestions or comments about the collection to us in those same ways.

Thanks again for keeping our collection vibrant and your information needs met!